Response 8

Notes:

For this week, the prompt is

In "Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere," Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung provide "a set of [five] rights and opportunities to ensure equal, substantive communicative freedom" (29–30) and "three dispositions and norms...important both in constituting a well-functioning, democratic public sphere and in sustaining the enabling structure of rights and opportunities" (31–32). In the later sections of the chapter, they analyze how the digital public sphere affects these rights, opportunities, dispositions, and norms. For one or two of the rights, opportunities, dispositions, and norms, extend or critique the authors' analysis.

The five rights and opportunities are:

Rights: Each person holds rights to basic liberties, including liberties of expression and association. This means maintaining a strong presumption against viewpoint discrimination to protect the independence of public discussion and enable citizens to form and express their views.
Expression: Each person must have good and equal chances to express views on matters of public concern to a public audience. This requires a fair opportunity to reach an audience based on motivation and ability, not command of resources.
Access: Each person must have good and equal access to instructive information on matters of public concern, provided that this information comes from reliable sources. This access, dependent on reasonable effort, ensures citizens have equal standing as participants in free public discussion.
Diversity: Each person must have good and equal chances to hear a wide range of views on issues of public concern, including competing perspectives on public values such as justice, fairness, and the common good.
Communicative Power: Each person must have good and equal chances to associate and explore interests and ideas together with others in order to arrive at common understandings and advance shared concerns. This is defined as the capacity for sustained joint (or collective) action.

The three dispositions and norms are:

Truth: Participants must be disposed to acknowledge the importance of truth and the norm associated with assertion. This requires making an effort to get things right, avoiding deliberate misrepresentation, and not showing reckless disregard or negligence for the truth or falsity of assertions.
Common Good: Participants should have a sense of and be concerned about the common good, based on some reasonable understanding that respects the equal standing and importance of others.
Civility: Participants must recognize the obligation to be prepared to justify views by referencing a reasonable conception of the common good. This is not merely politeness but rather an expression of accountability to others as equal participants, including a willingness to listen and accommodate reasonable views.

Suggested Selections:

Right/Opportunity to Critique: Communicative Power
- (Cohen and Fung definition: "Each person has good and equal chances to associate and explore interests and ideas together with others in order to arrive at common understandings and advance shared concerns".)
Disposition/Norm to Extend: Civility
- (Cohen and Fung definition: "Participants recognize the obligation... to be prepared to justify views by reference to that conception [of the common good], and being prepared to listen to others and be open to accommodating their reasonable views".)

Rationale and Key Arguments (Drawing on Sources):

1. Critiquing Communicative Power (Structural Challenge)

The analysis of surveillance capitalism provides a direct and fundamental critique of the feasibility of "Communicative Power" in the current digital sphere.

Undermining Autonomy: Communicative power is defined as the capacity for sustained joint (or collective) action. The central threat posed by surveillance capitalism is its need to supplant autonomous action (regulation by the self) with heteronomous action (regulation by others). Surveillance capital extracts behavioral surplus to produce guaranteed outcomes, necessitating the use of the means of behavior modification (tuning/nudging). Collective action, which stems from the assertion of free will and the ability to join promises for a shared future, is therefore structurally undermined when systems are engineered to channel behavior along predictable, profitable courses.
Asymmetry of Knowledge and Power: Surveillance capitalists unilaterally control the division of learning in society, deciding "Who knows?" and "Who decides who decides?". This extreme asymmetry of power makes it nearly impossible for individuals to build true collective action based on shared knowledge, thus compromising the potential for public vigilance needed to build communicative power.

2. Extending Civility (Behavioral/Ethical Challenge)

The supplementary literature on virtue ethics and digital engagement allows you to extend Cohen and Fung's notion of Civility beyond a mere political obligation into a detailed account of individual behavioral and psychological demands.

The Difficulty of Civility Online: Civility is challenging because online communication is prone to the online disinhibition effect, where the absence of face-to-face interaction leads to decreased civility and increased verbal attacks. This directly violates the disposition of Civility, which requires accountability and a willingness to listen.
Virtues Required: Civility relies heavily on the practice of self-control, which means monitoring one's cognitive biases and non-rational tendencies (like out-party animus). Users must exert effort to look past ideological affiliations to evaluate the reasonableness of a claim, which is crucial for fulfilling the civility requirement of justifying views and accommodating reasonable perspectives.
Sociological Understanding: Practicing civility, alongside inclusivity, helps correct epistemic sorting (retreating from opposing perspectives) and broadens one's sociological understanding of the political community. This demonstrates that civility is not just about manners, but a necessary condition for acquiring the information needed for practical wisdom and flourishing.

This is a great approach. Let's look at the two ideas—Communicative Power and Civility—and combine them into a simple, two-paragraph critique based on the material in the sources.

How Online Platforms Impact Communicative Power and Civility

One of the rights to ensure equal, substantive communicative freedom, listed by Cohen and Fung, is Communicative Power, which means that every person should have "good and equal chances to associate and explore interests and ideas together with others in order to arrive at common understandings and advancing common concerns". I essentially understand this as the ability to take sustained collective action. However, I think this idea is weakened by how social media platforms work today. Some modern companies profit by using behavioral modification to push people toward actions that make the company money. True collective action requires that we assert our own freedom or "will to will". But if systems are designed to automate us and shape our behavior for others' ends, it becomes much harder for citizens to freely organize and create the sustained collective power that democracy needs.

Another important idea in "Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere" is one of the three dispositions and norms that shape how people use their rights and opportunities. Civility is the rule that participants must be "prepared to justify views by reference to that conception, of the common good, and being prepared to listen to others and be open to accommodating their reasonable views". This is not just about being polite; it's about being accountable as equals. But on these days, Civility is hard to maintain through online mediums. As mentioned in "Disengagement in the Digital Age" by Kirsten Worden, there are some studies that imply that because we communicate in text form and not in a face-to-face setting, we have no self-control and can easily resort to behavior that is a display of incivility or an attack against others. To counteract this, one has to apply self-control. This means looking past someone's political identity to judge if their claim is reasonable, rather than just reacting impulsively or with anger. Civility requires this active mental effort to listen and tolerate differing views.